Subtitles and Transcript

Sanjay Pradhan

0:11
I grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state,and I remember when I was six years old,I remember coming home one day to find a cartfull of the most delicious sweets at our doorstep.My brothers and I dug in,and that's when my father came home.He was livid, and I still remember how we criedwhen that cart with our half-eaten sweetswas pulled away from us.

0:48
Later, I understood why my father got so upset.Those sweets were a bribefrom a contractor who was trying to get my fatherto award him a government contract.My father was responsible for building roads in Bihar,and he had developed a firm stance against corruption,even though he was harassed and threatened.His was a lonely struggle, because Biharwas also India's most corrupt state,where public officials were enriching themselves,[rather] than serving the poor who had no meansto express their anguish if their childrenhad no food or no schooling.

1:39
And I experienced this most viscerallywhen I traveled to remote villages to study poverty.And as I went village to village,I remember one day, when I was famished and exhausted,and I was almost collapsingin a scorching heat under a tree,and just at that time, one of the poorest men in that villageinvited me into his hut and graciously fed me.Only I later realized that what he fed mewas food for his entire family for two days.This profound gift of generositychallenged and changed the very purpose of my life.I resolved to give back.

2:41
Later, I joined the World Bank, which sought to fightsuch poverty by transferring aid from rich to poor countries.My initial work focused on Uganda, where I focusedon negotiating reforms with the Finance Ministry of Ugandaso they could access our loans.But after we disbursed the loans, I remembera trip in Uganda where I found newly built schoolswithout textbooks or teachers,new health clinics without drugs,and the poor once again without any voice or recourse.It was Bihar all over again.

3:26
Bihar represents the challenge of development:abject poverty surrounded by corruption.Globally, 1.3 billion people live on less than$1.25 a day, and the work I did in Ugandarepresents the traditional approach to these problemsthat has been practiced since 1944,when winners of World War II, 500 founding fathers,and one lonely founding mother,gathered in New Hampshire, USA,to establish the Bretton Woods institutions,including the World Bank.And that traditional approach to developmenthad three key elements. First, transfer of resourcesfrom rich countries in the Northto poorer countries in the South,accompanied by reform prescriptions.Second, the development institutions that channeledthese transfers were opaque, with little transparencyof what they financed or what results they achieved.And third, the engagement in developing countrieswas with a narrow set of government eliteswith little interaction with the citizens, who arethe ultimate beneficiaries of development assistance.

4:50
Today, each of these elements is opening updue to dramatic changes in the global environment.Open knowledge, open aid, open governance,and together, they represent three key shiftsthat are transforming developmentand that also hold greater hope for the problemsI witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar.

5:16
The first key shift is open knowledge.You know, developing countries today will not simplyaccept solutions that are handed down to themby the U.S., Europe or the World Bank.They get their inspiration, their hope,their practical know-how,from successful emerging economies in the South.They want to know how China lifted 500 million peopleout of poverty in 30 years,how Mexico's Oportunidades programimproved schooling and nutrition for millions of children.This is the new ecosystem of open-knowledge flows,not just traveling North to South, but South to South,and even South to North,with Mexico's Oportunidades today inspiring New York City.

6:13
And just as these North-to-South transfers are opening up,so too are the development institutionsthat channeled these transfers.This is the second shift: open aid.Recently, the World Bank opened its vault of datafor public use, releasing 8,000 economic and social indicatorsfor 200 countries over 50 years,and it launched a global competition to crowdsourceinnovative apps using this data.Development institutions today are also openingfor public scrutiny the projects they finance.Take GeoMapping. In this map from Kenya,the red dots show where all the schools financed by donorsare located, and the darker the shade of green,the more the number of out-of-school children.So this simple mashup reveals that donorshave not financed any schools in the areaswith the most out-of-school children,provoking new questions. Is development assistancetargeting those who most need our help?In this manner, the World Bank has now GeoMapped30,000 project activities in 143 countries,and donors are using a common platformto map all their projects.This is a tremendous leap forward in transparencyand accountability of aid.

7:49
And this leads me to the third, and in my view,the most significant shift in development:open governance. Governments today are opening upjust as citizens are demanding voice and accountability.From the Arab Spring to the Anna Hazare movement in India,using mobile phones and social medianot just for political accountabilitybut also for development accountability.Are governments delivering services to the citizens?So for instance, several governments in Africaand Eastern Europe are opening their budgets to the public.

8:31
But, you know, there is a big difference between a budgetthat's public and a budget that's accessible.This is a public budget. (Laughter)And as you can see, it's not really accessibleor understandable to an ordinary citizenthat is trying to understand how the government is spending its resources.To tackle this problem, governments are using new toolsto visualize the budget so it's more understandableto the public.In this map from Moldova, the green color showsthose districts that have low spending on schoolsbut good educational outcomes,and the red color shows the opposite.Tools like this help turn a shelf full of inscrutable documentsinto a publicly understandable visual,and what's exciting is that with this openness,there are today new opportunities for citizensto give feedback and engage with government.So in the Philippines today, parents and studentscan give real-time feedback on a website,Checkmyschool.org, or using SMS, whether teachersand textbooks are showing up in school,the same problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar.And the government is responsive. So for instance,when it was reported on this website that 800 studentswere at risk because school repairs had stalleddue to corruption, the Department of Educationin the Philippines took swift action.

10:18
And you know what's exciting is that this innovationis now spreading South to South, from the Philippinesto Indonesia, Kenya, Moldova and beyond.In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, even an impoverishedcommunity was able to use these toolsto voice its aspirations.This is what the map of Tandale looked likein August, 2011. But within a few weeks,university students were able to use mobile phonesand an open-source platform to dramatically mapthe entire community infrastructure.And what is very exciting is that citizens were thenable to give feedback as to which health or water pointswere not working, aggregatedin the red bubbles that you see,which together provides a graphic visualof the collective voices of the poor.Today, even Bihar is turning around and opening upunder a committed leadership that is making governmenttransparent, accessible and responsive to the poor.

11:39
But, you know, in many parts of the world,governments are not interested in opening upor in serving the poor, and it is a real challengefor those who want to change the system.These are the lonely warriorslike my father and many, many others,and a key frontier of development workis to help these lonely warriors join handsso they can together overcome the odds.So for instance, today, in Ghana, courageous reformersfrom civil society, Parliament and government,have forged a coalition for transparent contractsin the oil sector, and, galvanized by this,reformers in Parliament are now investigating dubious contracts.These examples give new hope, new possibilityto the problems I witnessed in Ugandaor that my father confronted in Bihar.

12:49
Two years ago, on April 8th, 2010, I called my father.It was very late at night, and at age 80,he was typing a 70-page public interest litigationagainst corruption in a road project.Though he was no lawyer, he argued the case in courthimself the next day. He won the ruling,but later that very evening,he fell, and he died.He fought till the end, increasingly passionatethat to combat corruption and poverty,not only did government officials need to be honest,but citizens needed to join togetherto make their voices heard.These became the two bookends of his life,and the journey he traveled in betweenmirrored the changing development landscape.

13:57
Today, I'm inspired by these changes, and I'm excitedthat at the World Bank, we are embracingthese new directions, a significant departurefrom my work in Uganda 20 years ago.We need to radically open up developmentso knowledge flows in multiple directions,inspiring practitioners, so aid becomes transparent,accountable and effective, so governments open upand citizens are engaged and empoweredwith reformers in government.We need to accelerate these shifts.If we do, we will find that the collective voicesof the poor will be heard in Bihar,in Uganda, and beyond.We will find that textbooks and teacherswill show up in schools for their children.We will find that these children, too,have a real chance of breaking their way out of poverty.Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)